When the movie got re-released to theaters in 1981, Lucas added the "A New Hope" subtitle to the opening crawl and made some additional effects updates on the opening scene with the ships in space. When the movie came out on VHS in 1985, there was yet another new audio track (mostly with just slight changes in the timing of dialogue) and the accompaying LaserDisc version was sped up by 3% to keep the entire movie on a single disc. The 1993 LaserDisc version cleaned up the prints and made some color corrections. So even before the "Special Edition" version hit theaters in 1997, Lucas had been modifying his film. Admittedly, he was mostly just tightening things up around the edges before, but my point is that unless you saw the movie in theaters in the first two, maybe three, months that it was out, you have never seen the original version.
I find myself thinking about this because I've spent the past couple weeks setting up a home media server to host movies and TV show files locally. I had set something up for music a year or two back, but I wanted to expand that to video after seeing and increasing and accelerating news tidbits about this or that show being suddenly removed from one of the streaming services. I don't want to hunt through a long list of brand names with a plus on the end of them just to find a show I was already in the middle of watching. So I managed to salvage and repurpose an old laptop with a new 8TB plugged into it, and started throwing MP4s on there for shows and movies I either already enjoy or have been on my TO WATCH list.
And what struck me was coming across some 'oddities.' Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, for example, has been on my TO WATCH list on Disney+ because I want to see how well it holds up after several decades. But when I went to download it, the episode count was wrong. It turns out they don't have the Red Skull episode because it features some Nazi symbolism. OK, fair enough, but they also then re-ordered half the episodes. So the collective experience is different than what was intended. Once I got copies of everything, I had to manually re-order them and find a bootleg copy of that Red Skull episode if I want to see what the original series looked like.
And when I went to check out Daria -- which I'd seen clips of but never got around to watching -- I learned that it originally used a variety of then-popular songs as incidental background music. Due to copyright and licenses problems, they opted to simply remove all the music rather than either A) pay the appropriate royalties or B) add in similar-sounding-but-less-expensive alterantives. The show, as it's been seen since the original broadcasts have effectively been without a soundtrack. It shouldn't surprise you, though, that some enterprising fans ripped the DVD releases and went about adding all the original music back in. That's obviously not up for streaming anywhere, but you can find digital copies if you know where to look.
But we see that in virtually every reprint. In the case of anything originally published before, say, 1995, the reprints are being re-colored. Maybe they're trying to adhere closely to the originals, but maybe not. I made a post not quite a year ago about how the Masterworks had changed the racial diversity of background characters by making some of them Black. And for particularly old reprints where even the original line art isn't available, they'll scan actual finished comics and try to manually strip out the color. These days, that generally involves scanning the page and digitially erasing everything that isn't black but there's some inevitable touch-ups that have to happen as well. And this was even more significant before computer work became the norm -- Greg Theakston used to bleach comics pages to get rid of the color, but this would also lighten the black marks pretty considerably as well and he'd wind up having to re-draw/re-ink not insignificant portions again.
In many -- probably even most -- cases, these changes are insignificant. They have zero impact on the vast majority of readers' thoughts about the story. I've watched more than a few reaction videos to the original Star Wars and, while people will not infrequently comment on how good the CGI is for 1977, not realizing the actual CGI portions are from two decades later, they're very much more invested in the story. They laugh at the banter between C-3PO and R2-D2, and take great interest in the potential love triangle set up between Luke and Leia and Han, and cheer when the Death Star blows up. So who are we to say that Lucas was wrong?
But the question you need to ask yourself is: why am I trying to get into this story? Is it just to get the general gist of it, so I have a vague notion of what people are talking about? Or are you interested in what exactly readers got back in the day? For me, personally, I tend to be more interested in the original. Even if it is a technically inferior version, because I want to see the piece with as much context as I can. And that necessarily includes whatever artifacts -- whether of the materials used or the imposed limitations from money-holders -- were present in the original.
Which is part of why I have a huge library of physical comics. In most cases, I want to experience the story in the same way a fan did originally. That often means the original floppies. I obviously can never experience the full cultural/social context those issues were published in/during/around but the closer I can get to that, the better for my purposes. But that obviously requires more effort on my part, trying to track down originals and/or reprints that alter nothing.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you reach for a shelf full of trade paperbacks instead of rifling through the dollar bin.
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